Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,982

This is the grave of Ray Allen Billington.

Born in 1903 in Bay City, Michigan, Billington went to the University of Wisconsin for undergraduate degree. He decided to become a historian, did a master’s degree at the University of Michigan, and then went to Harvard for his Ph.D. He then taught a bunch of places–Clark, Smith, Ohio State, then Northwestern for a long time starting in 1944 and then going to the Newberry Library in 1962.

Billington became probably the most important historian of the U.S. West in the postwar period. This was a time in which the field was still dominated by the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner, usually taken pretty uncritically and built upon rather than critiqued as they would be a few decades later. Turner’s idea was that the frontier was the foundational theme of American history, a place in which the nation made itself over and over again until the 1890s, when the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. In other words, the study of the West was much more a process than a place. Today, this has largely been reversed. The study of the American West is today largely about the dry area west of the Mississippi River, though with some expansion into western Canada and northern Mexico. But at this time, a study of early Ohio was just as valuable to the field as a study of early Montana.

Billington’s first book was The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism, published in 1938 and while he was already on the frontier side of things here, he moved more directly toward the question after his initial project. His most important book was Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, which pretty much lays out the idea in the title. It was a big ol’beast, around 800 pages. Another of his books was The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860, which again, largely focused on that frontier process, particularly around the fur trade. He was really into these guys being free men on the frontier and doing the initial work of tying these areas to the United States. This isn’t entirely wrong. The objection to it today is more the political problems of totally ignoring the awful violence of many of these men toward the Tribes and how their real frontier activity was laying the groundwork for genocide.

In 1973, in case the connection between Billington and Turner wasn’t clear enough, Billington wrote a biography of Turner. Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher won the Bancroft Prize in 1974, which is given to the best couple of books written in the field. Other books along this line include The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense in 1966, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis in 1971, and America’s Frontier Culture: Three Essays in 1977. His last book was Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1981.

I don’t think any of Billington’s books matter today. I have never even picked one up. I was in a U.S. West Ph.D. program and there were multiple paths one could take there, even within that subfield. Some faculty really focused on the old timey guys and following those historiographical questions through time, even as they didn’t change all that much through the decades. Other faculty were much more interested in the current questions of class, race, and gender, as well as the environment and the borderlands. You can guess which of these two paths more interested me. I never really saw the reason for going back to out-of-date books unless you need them for something. If I was to write something about fur traders–which feels very, very unlikely but honestly who can tell what the future holds other than Trump shutting down the universities and putting historians into concentration camps–sure, I would go back to Billington’s work. I reviewed all the old timber industry work when I wrote Empire of Timber. Some of it is pretty valuable, though more for its factual findings than its interpretation. Anyway, perhaps this discussion of how historians deal with their ancestors in the field is interesting to folks, perhaps it is not. And of course different historians have different approaches to these questions.

Billington’s New York Times obituary has an interesting and perhaps unexpected jag to it. The 1970s oil shortages really freaked him out. They did for a lot of Americans, sure. But for Billington, this was the new end of the frontier. Sure, Americans hadn’t had a physical frontier to remake themselves in for a long time, but there was colonialism and then World War II and then the Space Race and American global domination. So you could interpret these things through that frontier lens if you were already inclined in that direction. I wouldn’t but then, you know, I don’t see the world that way. So to quote the obituary:

We have reached the limits of the past type of life that we’ve been able to enjoy in this country,” he said, explaining that future historians would see the 1970’s as a watershed decade, one in which values from the American frontier began yielding to European values. One consequence, he said, may be increasing governmental control over everyday life as resources become more scarce.

”It may be a very long twilight, of course,” he said. ”There’s going to have to be a permanent adjustment in mentality, and I’m afraid it’s going to take years or decades or even a century of agony before we adjust to it.”

I don’t really know what Billington’s personal politics were, but boy does this sound like a sort of proto-Trumpist set of feelings. You have the evil foreigners getting in the way of the American frontier mentality. You have Big Bad Government telling us what to do. And you have great fears of how Americans could possibly live this way. It all sounds pretty dumb to me, but honestly, while so many Americans could never articulate this stuff, it does feel more to this moment than it probably was in 1979.

Billington died in 1981, at the age of 77. I wonder if he ended his life embracing the Reagan nostalgia for the frontier and deification of the individual in the 1980 election.

Ray Allen Billington is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Bancroft Prize, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Townsend Hoopes, who won another of the 1974 prizes for The Devil and John Foster Dulles, is in Arlington and Samuel Eliot Morison, who won in 1972 for The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, is in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.